Operation Chaos

by Poul Anderson

  After several blocks, safely distant, I reached the local grade school and stowed my Tarnkappe in a playground trash can. Thereafter I walked openly, an unremarkable citizen on his lawful occasions. The night being new, I did have to be careful that no passer-by recognized me. At the first phone booth I called Barney Sturlason's home. He said to come right on over. Rather than a taxi, I took a crosstown carpet, reasoning I'd be more anonymous as one of a crowd of passengers. I was.

  Barney opened the door. Hallway light that got past his shoulders spilled yellow across me. He let out a soft whistle. "I figured you'd be too bushed to work today, Steve, but not that you'd look like Monday after Ragnarok. What's wrong?"

  "Your family mustn't hear," I said.

  He turned immediately and led me to his study. Waving me to one of the leather armchairs, he relocked the door, poured two hefty Scotches, and settled down opposite me. "Okay," he invited.

  I told him. Never before had I seen anguish on those features. "Oh no," he whispered.

  Shaking himself, like a bear malting ready to charge, he asked: "What can I do?"

  "First off, lend me a broom," I answered.

  "Hold on," he said. "I do feel you've been rash already. Tell me your next move."

  "I'm going to Siloam and learn what I can."

  "I thought so." The chair screaked under Barney's shifting weight. "Steve, it won't wash. Burgling the Johnny cathedral, maybe trying to beat an admission out of some priest?No. You'd only make trouble for yourself and Ginny at a time when she needs every bit of your resources. The FBI will investigate, with professionals. You could wreck the very clues you're after, assuming they exist. Face it, you are jumping to conclusions." He considered me. "A moral point in addition. You didn't agree that mob yesterday had the right to make its own laws. Are you claiming the right for yourself?"

  I took a sip and let the whisky burn its loving way down my gullet. "Ginny and I've had a while to think," I said. "We expected you'd raise the objections you do. Let me take them in order. I don't want to sound dramatic, but how can we be in worse trouble? Add anything to infinity and, and, and"?I must stop for another belt of booze?"you've got the same infinity.

  "About the FBI being more capable. We don't aim to bull around just to be doing something; Please give us credit for some brains. Sure, the Bureau must've had agents in the Johannine Church for a long while, dossiers on its leaders, the standard stuff. But you'll remember how at the HCUA hearings a few years back, no evidence could be produced to warrant putting the Church on the Attorney Generals list, in spite of its disavowal of American traditions.'

  "The Johnnies are entitled to their opinions," Barney said. "Shucks, I'll agree with certain claims of theirs. This society has gotten too worldly, too busy chasing dollars and fun, too preoccupied with sex and not enough with love, too callous about the unfortunate-"

  "Barney," I snapped, "you're trying to sidetrack me and cool me off, but it's no go. Either I get your help soon or I take my marbles elsewhere."

  He sighed, fumbled a pipe from his tweed jacket and began stuffing it. "Okay, continue. If the Feds can't find proof that the Johannine hierarchy is engaged in activities illegal or subversive, does that prove the hierarchy is diabolically clever . . . or simply innocent?"

  "Well, the Gnostics brag of having information and powers that nobody else does," I said, "and they do get involved one way or another in more and more of the social unrest going on-and mainly, who else, what else might be connected with this thing that's happened? Maybe even unwittingly; that's imaginable; but connected.'

  I leaned forward. "Look, Barney," I went on, "Shining Knife admits he'll have to move slow. And Washington's bound to keep him on tighter leash than he wants personally. Tomorrow, no doubt, he'll have agents interviewing various Johnnies. In the nature of the case, they'll learn nothing. You'd need mighty strong presumptive evidence to get a search warrant against a church, especially one that so many people are convinced bears the final Word of God, and most especially when the temple's a labyrinth of places that none but initiates in the various degrees are supposed to enter.

  "Well, if and when you got your warrant, what could you uncover? This was no ordinary job. The usual tests for nigromancy and so forth aren't applicable. Why, if I were High Adept Zarathra, I'd invite the G-men to come inspect everything that's religiously permissible. What could he lose?"

  "What could you gain?" Barney replied.

  "Perhaps nothing I said. "But I mean to act now, not a week from now; and I won't be handicapped by legal rules and public opinion; and I do have special abilities and experience in dark matters; and they won't expect me; and in short, if anything's there to find, I've the best chance in sight of finding it."

  He scowled past me.

  "As for the moral issue," I said, "you may be right. On the other hand, I'm not about to commit brutalities like some imaginary Special Agent Vee Eye Eye. And in spite of Shining Knife's fear, I honestly don't see what could provoke a major invasion from the Low World. That'd bring in the Highest, and the Adversary can't afford such a confrontation.

  "Which is worse, Barney, an invasion of property and privacy, maybe a profanation of a few shrines . . . or a child in hell?"

  He set his glass down on an end table. "You win!" exploded from him. Blinking in surprise: "I seem to 've smashed the bottom out of this tumbler."

  "Finish mine," I said. "I'm on my way."

  We rose together. "How about a weapon?" he offered.

  I shook my head. "Let's not compound the felony. Whatever I meet, probably a gun won't handle." It seemed needless to add that I carried a hunting knife under my civvies and, in wolf-shape, a whole mouthful of armament. "Uh, we'll fix it so you're in the clear. I visited you; that can no doubt be proven if they try hard. But I sneaked back after I left and boosted your broom."

  He nodded. "I suggest you take the Plymouth," he said "It's not as fast as either sports job, but it runs quieter and the besom was tuned only the other day." He stood for a bit, thinking. Stillness and blackness pressed on the windowpanes. "Meanwhile I'll start research on the matter. Bill Hardy . . . Janice Wenzel from our library staff . . . hm, we could co-opt your Dr. Ashman, and how about Prof Griswold from the University? ... and more, able close-mouthed people, who'll be glad to help and hang any consequences. If nothing else, we can assemble all unclassified data regarding the Low Continuum, and maybe some that aren't. We can set up equations delimiting various conceivable approaches to the rescue problem, and crank 'em through the computator, and eliminate unworkable ideas. Yeah, I'll get busy right off."

  What can you say to a guy like that except thanks'

  XXV

  IT SEEMED IN character for the Johannine Church to put its cathedral for the whole Upper Midwest not in Chicago, Milwaukee, or any other city, but off alone, a hundred miles even from our modest town. The placing symbolized and emphasized the Gnostic rejection of this world as evil, the idea of salvation through secret rites and occult knowledge. Unlike Petrine Christianity, this kind didn't come to you; aside from dismal little chapels here and there, scarcely more than recruiting stations, you came to it.

  Obvious, yes. And therefore, I thought, probably false. Nothing about Gnosticism was ever quite what it seemed. That lay in its very nature.

  Perhaps its enigmas, veils behind veils and mazes within mazes, were one thing that drew so many people these days. The regular churches made their theologies plain. They clearly described and delimited the mysteries as such, with the common-sense remark that we mortals aren't able to understand every aspect of the Highest. They declared that this world was given us to live in by the Creator, and hence must be fundamentally good; a lot of the imperfections are due to human bollixing, and it's our job to improve matters.

  Was that overly unromantic? Did the Johannines appeal to the daydream, childish but always alive in j us, of becoming omnipotent by learning a sec denied the common herd? I'd made that scornful assumption, and still believed it he
ld a lot of truth. But the more I thought, the less it felt like the whole explanation.

  I had plenty of time and chance and need for thought, flitting above the night land, where scattered farms and villages looked nearly as remote as the stars overhead. The air that slid around the windfield was turning cold. Its breath went through and through me, disrupting cobwebs in my head until I saw how little I'd really studied, how much I'd lazily taken for granted. But I saw, too, facts I'd forgotten, and how they might be fitted together in a larger understanding. Grimly, as I traveled, I set myself to review what I could about the Johannine Church, from the ground up.

  Was it merely a thing of the past two or three generations, a nut cult that happened to appeal to something buried deep in Western man? Or was it in truth as old as it maintained-founded by Christ himself?

  The other churches said No. Doubtless Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant should not be lumped together as Petrine. But the popular word made a rough kind of sense. They did have a mutual interpretation of Jesus' charge to his disciples. They agreed on the_ special importance of Peter. No matter what differences bad arisen since, including the question of apostolic succession, they all derive from the Twelve in a perfectly straightforward way.

  And yet . . . and yet . . . there is that strange passage at the close of the Gospel According to St. John:

  "Then Peter, turning about, seeth the disciple whom Jesus loved following; which also leaned on his breast at supper, and said, Lord, which is he that betrayeth thee'? Peter seeing him saith to Jesus, Lord, and what shall this man do? Jesus saith unto him, if I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee? follow thou me. Then went this saying abroad among the brethren, that that disciple should not die: yet Jesus said not unto him, He shall not die; but, if I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee? This is the disciple which testifieth of these things, and wrote these things: and we know that his testimony is true."

  I don't understand it, and I'm not sure Biblical scholars do either, regardless of what they say. Certainly it gave rise to a fugitive tradition that here Our Lord was creating something more than any of them but John ever knew?some unproclaimed other Church, within or parallel to the Church of Peter, which would at the end manifest itself and guide man to a new dispensation. Today's cult might have originated entirely in this century. But the claim it trumpeted had been whispered for two thousand years.

  The association of such a claim with otherworldliness was almost inevitable. Under many labels, Gnosticism has been a recurring heresy. The original form, or rather forms, were an attempt to fuse Christianity with a mishmash of Oriental mystery cults, Neoplatonism, and sorcery. Legend traced it back to the Simon Magus who appears in the eighth chapter of Acts, whose memory was accordingly held in horror by the orthodox. Modern Johanninism was doubly bold in reviving that dawn-age movement by name, in proclaiming it not error but a higher truth and Simon Magus not a corrupter but a prophet.

  Could that possibly be right? Might the world actually be at the morning of the Reign of Love? I didn't know; how could I? But by using my brains, as the Petrine tradition held we should, rather than my emotions, I'd decided the Johannine dogma was false. Its spreading acceptance I found due to plain human irrationality.

  So you got communities of Truth Seekers, settling down to practice their rites and meditations where nobody would interfere. They drew pilgrims, who needed housing, food, services. The priests, priestesses, acolytes, and lay associates did too. A temple (more accurate than cathedral, but the Johnnies insisted on the latter word to emphasize at they were Christians) needed income; and as a rule it had a substantial endowment, shrewdly managed. Thus a town often grew up around the original foundation?like Siloam, where I was headed.

  Simple. Banal. Why did I bother marshaling information that any reader of the daily papers had? Merely to escape thinking about Valeria? No. To get as much as possible straight in my head, when most was tangled and ghostly.

  The Something Else, the Thing Beyond . . . was it no illusion, but a deeper insight? And if so, an insight?into what? I thought of the Johannines' intolerance and troublemaking. I thought of the frank assertion, that their adepts held powers no one else imagined and that more was revealed to them every year. I thought of stories told by certain apostates, who hadn't advanced far in their degrees when they experienced that which scared them off: nothing illegal, immoral, or otherwise titillating; merely ugly, hateful, sorrowful, and hence not very newsworthy; deniable or ignorable by those who didn't want to believe them. I thought of the Gnostic theology, what part of it wash made public: terrible amidst every twist of revelation and logic, the identification of their Demiurge with the God of the Old Testament with Satan.

  I thought of Antichrist.

  But there I shied off, being agnostic about such matters, as I've said. I took my stand on the simple feeling that it didn't make sense the Almighty would operate in any such fashion.

  Light glimmered into view, far off across the prairie. I was glad of journey's end, no matter what happened next. I didn't care to ride further with those reflections of mine.

  Siloam was ordinary frame houses in ordinary yards along ordinary streets. A sign beneath the main airlane, as you neared, said Pop. 5240; another announced that the Lions Club met every Thursday at the Kobold Kettle Restaurant. There were a couple of small manufacturing enterprises, a city hall, an elementary school, a high school, a firehouse, a bedraggled park, a hotel, more service stations than needed. The business district held stores, a cafe or two, a bank, chirurgeon's and dentist's offices above a Rexall apothecary . . . the American works.

  That homeliness made the rest freezingly alien. Though the hour lacked of midnight, downtown was a tomb. The residential streets were nearly as deserted nobody out for a stroll, no teenagers holding hands, scarcely a stick or a wagon moving, beneath the rare lamps-once in a while a robed and hooded figure slowly pacing. Each home lay drawn into itself, behind drawn shades. Where the inhabitants weren't asleep, they were probably not watching crystal or playing cards or having a drink or making love, they were most likely at the devotions and studies they hoped would qualify them for a higher religious degree, more knowledge and power and surety of salvation.

  And everything centered on the cathedral. It soared above the complex of boxlike ancillary buildings that surrounded it, above town and plain. The pictures I'd seen of it had not conveyed the enormity. Those flat, bone-white walls went up and up and up, till the roof climbed farther yet to make the vast central cupola. From afar, the windows looked like nailheads, one row to a story; but then I saw the stained glass air, each filling half the facade it occupied with murky colors and bewildering patterns, Mandala at the west end and Eye of God at the east. From the west, also, rose the single tower, which in a photograph only looked austere, but now became one leap into the stars.

  Light played across the outside of the cathedral and shone dimly from its glass. I heard a chant, men's voices marching deep beneath the wild icy sweepings and soarings of women who sang on no scale I could identify, in no language of earth.

  ". . . Helfioth Alaritha arbor Neniotho Melitho Tarasunt

  Chanados Umia Theirura Marada Seliso . . ."

  The music was so amplified as to be audible to the very outskirts of town. And it never ended. This was a perpetual choir. Priests, acolytes, pilgrims were always on hand to step in when any of the six hundred and, one wearied. I failed to imagine how it must be to live in that day-and-night haze of canticle. If you were a dweller in Siloam, perhaps not even a Johnny, you'd soon stop noticing on a conscious level. But wouldn't the sound weave into your thoughts, dreams, bones, finally into your soul?

  I couldn't interpret the extrasensation I felt, either, more powerful for every yard I approached. Wrongness?or rightness of a kind that I was simply unable to fathom?

  After all, the attendant at the gate was a pleasant young man, his tow hair and blue eyes right out of folk who'd been hereabouts for more than
a hundred years, his friendliness out of Walt Whitman's own America. When I had parked my broom in the lot that stretched wide and bare into the dark, approached him, and asked, "Okay to go in?" he regarded me for a moment before answering lightly, "You're not a communicant, are you?"

  "N-no," I said, a bit taken aback.

  He chuckled. "Wanna know how I can tell? They've got to the Elphue. We'd wait till Mary's invocation was finished before we entered."

  "I'm sorry, I?"

  "S Okay. Nobody minds, longs you're quiet. In theory, you're damned anyway. I don't buy that myself, know what I mean? My girl's a Methodist. I'll go along with the red tape the priests want before they let me marry her, but I can't believe she'll burn." He realized he might have spoken too freely and added in haste: "How come you're this late? The tourists arrive in the daytime."

  I decided he wasn't a lay brother, just an employee, and no more fanatical than the average Christian of any type-in short, one of the decent majority you find in all organizations, all countries. I was prepared for his question. "I travel in ankhs," I said. "Got an appointment in town early tomorrow morning before moving on. Got hung up today and didn't reach here till now. Your choir is so famous I didn't want to miss it."

  "Thanks." He handed me a leaflet. "You know the rules? Use the main door. Take a seat in the Heath-uh, the Spectators' Corner. No noise, no picture-taking. When you, want to leave, do it quietly, same way as you came.'

  I nodded and walked through the gate. The auxiliary buildings formed a square around a paved yard centered on the cathedral. Where they did not butt directly on each other, walls had been raised between, making the only entrances three portals closable by wire gates. The offices, storerooms, living quarters were plain, in fact drab. A few cenobites move about, male scarcely distinguishable from female in their robes , and overshadowing cowls. I remembered a complete absence of any scandals, anywhere in the world, though the Johannines mingled the sexes in celibacy. Well, of course their monks and nuns weren't simply consecrated; they were initiates. They had gone beyond baptism, beyond the elementary mystery rites and name-changing (with the old public name retained for secular use) that corresponded to a Petrine confirmation. For years they had mortified the flesh, disciplined the soul, bent the mind to mastering what their holy books called divine revelation, and unbelievers called pretentious nonsense, and some believers in a different faith called unrecognized diabolism . . .